Pakistan poultry industry seeks 10-year tax holiday

The Pakistan poultry industry has sought a
10-year tax holiday in the upcoming budget as a compensation for over Rs10
billion (€131m) losses it has so far suffered from the ongoing bird flu
crisis.

The poultry industry has asked President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister
Shaukat Aziz to start eating chickens at public meetings to give a message to
the nation that poultry products are still safe to eat.

This move, it
added, was likely to reinstate consumers' confidence in chicken products almost
shattered by media reports of a possible pandemic in the wake of spread of H5N1
virus through human to human contact.

The poultry industry in
Pakistan is sinking and people are leaving the business with huge losses and no
apparent signs of any compensation from the government. Fifty per cent of the
poultry farms in the country have so far been closed.

Over 1.2m
people were associated with the poultry industry and security of their
livelihood was the duty of the government, the industry
argues.

Chickens comprise 45% of the overall meat consumption of the
country. If people stop eating chicken products this would greatly increase
demand for mutton and beef and the country would be unable to produce animals
with such a ratio owing to which it would only rely on imported meet from other
countries, including India and Iran.